New Theme Ideas?

I’m running an old version of Weaver now, and I dread updating it because it means sacrificing all the tweaks I made. But that is only a lazy man’s excuse. I suppose I’ll have to suck it up and do the work. What bothers me about Weaver are the too-round corners (see sidebar to the right). Somehow makes design seem amateurish.

What I’d really like is something more black and white, or muted colors. I tried Grayscales, which looked good-ish, except that color images jumped off the page as if they couldn’t wait to get out. Too disconcerting.

And then I don’t want to sacrifice my site’s banner picture, though I am happy to modify it or replace it with the current background. (I’ve been asked many times: I’m the guy on the right.)

So many WordPress themes are designed for pictures or posts with minimal words. But nobody comes to this site for the pictures.

Ideas? I’m all ears.

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Please try to incorporate mobile-friendly elements! I tried loading the site on my wife’s iPhone to share one of your articles with her but it was a tough load! Plus we don’t have an unlimited data plan so the attempt to load large background was even less helpful.

I actually like the one you have, I’m sure you can tweak it a bit more for the black and white feeling you’re looking for. If you switch to Grayscales I Just might go ahead and filibuster your decision for 24 hours.

Also, about the background, I assumed that having these two guys hidden behind the posts was some kind intended pun. Otherwise I would suggest backgrounds where the left and right side was visible and meaningful for the concept you are looking for.

Joseph R.

Chances are that the browser you use in your iPhone does not automatically switches to mobile browsing when visiting wordpress blogs.

You need to check your setting. When done sites with mobile versions will be activated. In wmbriggs.com the browser will not load the background nor the right column; only text, pictures in the post and comments.

The only request I have is to avoid themes that blow up when you try to “zoom-in” on the page to make everything bigger, therefore easier to read. Your current theme behaves well in this regard (probably because “reply” comments aren’t nested underneath the “replied-to” comment). The themes used by Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit and Jeff Condon’s Air Vent both behave very badly. Scroll down to the comments following any posting on those two blogs and zoom in (command+ on a Mac) multiple times to see the carnage. But I only use Safari on my Mac, so it’s within the realm of possibility that it’s just a Safari thing.
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Just tested Climate Audit and Air Vent in Firefox and Chrome. Not quite as bad, but they still blow up the more times you zoom in. It looks like the web page renders in a width that is fixed to the physical size of the browser window on the screen. All the text gets bigger, but scrunched into a fixed width, with deeply-nested comments resulting in one word per line, and “miles” tall. The only way to compensate for that is to make the browser window REAL wide. The interesting thing is that both Firefox and Chrome zoom in every tab that is open in the browser, not just the active tab, whereas Safari only zooms in the active tab. In that respect, the Safari behavior is better.